RISE OF CANADA

Evening Post, Volume CXIII, Issue 54, 5 March 1927, Page 7

RISE OF CANADA

WOLFE 81-CENTENARY DINNER AT THE SAVOY (From Our Own Correspondent.) LONDON, 12th January. Britain's great regard for the Prince of Wales was voiced in bluff, soldierly language by General Lord Byng, of Vimy, at the Wolfe Society dinner at the Savoy Hotel, where the Prince was a guest. "I know you hate eulogy," Lord Byng said to the Prince, when proposing the loyal toasts, "but befor,: sitting down I must say this: We respect you for your position, sir, and damme, sir, we love you for yourself." Loud cheers rilled the room for some time before the Prince could reply to "the very nice way" in which "the toast had been proposed. "The toast of Wolfe's memory will be proposed by Sir Charles Warde, so that it is not for me to enlarge on the topic," said the Prince. But, knowing and_ loving Canada as I do, and not having anything new or interesting to report of my . family—(laughter)—Sir Charles must allow me to forestall him to a certain extent. (Cheers.) Every English-speaking boy is, as the saying goes, 'brought up on heroes.' James Wolfe ranks very high among them. The dramatic story of his death in the very moment of victory is one of the first that stirs our imagination when we begin, to read history. To our generation he has .a verp special appeal, because, from the very briefest sketch of his short life, it strikes one that he was just the typo of so many of the brilliant young soldiers who made a name - for themselves in the late war. He put his whole life into his profession, yet he was always full of new ideas, and, still more important, he never missed the opportunity of trying them out. But it was of the wider significance of Wolfe's name that I meant to speak, however briefly. It is rather as a pioneer, as a creator, than as a soldier, that we think of him now. There are, in this Empire's history, a few names that are imperishably associated with certain parts of our Empire. Before our schooldays arc over wo have linked Clive with India, Captain Cook with Australia, or Rhodes with the splendid country which bears his name. (Cheers.) And it is impossible to think of Canada without thinking of Wolfe. That first glimpse of Quebec inevitably brings him into one's mind." AGE OF PERFECT FREEDOM. After, the Sik-nt Toast "To the memory of Wolfe," had been honoured, Mr. Winston Churchill said: — "After hearing of the services, the triumphs, arid the sacrifices of General Wolfe, and his soldiers, we must also not forget to dwell upon the measureless consequences which flow from their achievement. Th romance of history is one of the strongest forces that unite and cement the British Empire. The Wolfe bi-centenary surely brings to our minds iv the most vivid fashion the romance of' Canadian history and the connection between Canada and the Motherland. The young English soldier, born and nurtured in our beautiful Kent, cherished dreams not only of martial victories, but, with penetrating eye, ho pierced the veil of the future and discerned with infalliblo assurance the coming greatness and splondour of the Dominion' of Britain Beyond the Seas and of the new world across the ocean, and Wolfe did not die on that famous morning on the Heights of Abraham before he knew that his, enduring military fame was won.

"We arc here to testify that his vision of the two Americas and of the Dominion of Canada—tho vision which then seemed a mere excursion of fancy —is nov; an accomplished fact. Indeed, tho fact- has far outstripped the range of Wolfe's imagination; even that genius has been outpaced by tho actual inarch of ovents. Ho si\w a populous, wealthy, progressive community; ho saw a nation arising in the vast, wild spaces gained by his sword for the British Crown. To-day wo see that Canada displays not only alt that ho foresaw, not only all that ho dreamed of—not only thoso seats of power and learning which nearly 200 years ago he predicted would arise—but also that Canada presents facts which would have fired Wolfe's military eye, but which his mind, adventurous though 'it was, had never dreamed of.

"What would Wolfo's emotion have been had it been granted to him to see a nation of 10,000,000 separated from a mighty neighbour by a frontier of '3000 miles along which no armed sentinel and no single war vessel can be found—(cheers) —and if at the- same time ho had been told that this same peaceful nation, whoso bounds are created only by laws and public faith, had latoly sent an army of a quarter of million, men to tho aid of the Mother Country .to fight in Europe against the most formidable soldiery in the world, to gain on the battlefields of the most terrible conflicts of which human I annals bear witness a reputation unsurpassed even in what I firmly believe to have boon the most valiant ago of man?" (Cheers.) 85, Fleet street.